Top 10 Most Visited Museums in the World

The Louvre in Paris is the most visited museum in the world, drawing about 9 million people a year. Behind it the top ten is dominated by Asia — four Chinese museums and the National Museum of Korea now sit in the global top ten, alongside the Vatican Museums, the British Museum, London's Natural History Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Introduction

The world's most visited museums share a few traits: encyclopedic collections, landmark buildings, a location in a major city, and — in most cases — free or very cheap admission. Britain's national museums dropped their entry charges in 2001 and their attendance roughly doubled; China's state museums are free by policy, and the country's museum-building programme over the past fifteen years has pushed four Chinese institutions into the global top ten.

How This Ranking Is Compiled

Museum attendance is self-reported, and no single body counts every museum on Earth. The figures below are drawn from the main published sources — The Art Newspaper's annual visitor survey, the TEA/AECOM Museum Index, China's National Cultural Heritage Administration, and the UK's Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.

Two caveats are worth stating plainly. First, museums publish on different schedules, so this list mixes 2025 and 2024 figures; the year is given for each entry. Second, the widely reported "most visited museums" ranking published each spring by The Art Newspaper covers art museums only, which is why science, history and natural history museums are missing from it. This list covers museums of every type, so it looks noticeably different.

1. Louvre, Paris — ~9.0 million visitors (2025)

• Annual Visitors: ~9.0 million (2025)
• Location: Paris, France
• Founded: 1793
• Collection Size: 380,000+ objects

The Louvre is the world's largest art museum by gallery area, occupying the Palais du Louvre, a fortress originally built in the 12th century by King Philip II. The museum's glass pyramid entrance, designed by I.M. Pei and completed in 1989, has become a symbol of Paris as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower.

The collection spans ancient Mesopotamian artifacts to 19th-century European painting. The Mona Lisa alone draws an estimated 80 percent of first-time visitors, with crowds often six deep around the small panel. Despite that single-work fixation, the Louvre's breadth is staggering — it would take an estimated 100 days to spend 30 seconds looking at every piece.

2. National Museum of China, Beijing — ~7.0 million visitors (2024)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.96 million (2024)
• Location: Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China
• Floor Area: 200,000 m²
• Admission: Free (timed booking required)

The National Museum of China on the east side of Tiananmen Square is one of the largest museum buildings in the world, with 200,000 square meters of floor space housing over 1.4 million objects. It traces Chinese history and art from prehistory to the present, including Shang dynasty bronzes, Tang dynasty pottery, and Revolutionary-era material.

The museum was formed in 2003 by merging the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the National Museum of Chinese History, and a major expansion completed in 2011 gave it its current scale. Free entry combined with compulsory advance booking means demand routinely exceeds the daily cap.

3. Vatican Museums, Vatican City — ~6.9 million visitors (2025)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.93 million (2025)
• Location: Vatican City
• Founded: 1506
• Notable: Home to the Sistine Chapel

The Vatican Museums are a complex of galleries within Vatican City, culminating in the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes. The collection includes over 70,000 works, of which roughly 20,000 are on display at any time, spanning Egyptian mummies, Renaissance masterpieces and modern religious art.

The museums follow a one-way route that takes two to three hours to walk. Visitor management is a permanent challenge — on peak days more than 30,000 people file through, raising long-standing concerns about the effect of humidity and carbon dioxide on the Sistine Chapel frescoes.

4. Shenzhen Museum, Shenzhen — ~6.8 million visitors (2024)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.81 million (2024)
• Location: Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
• Founded: 1981
• Admission: Free

Shenzhen Museum is the least familiar name in the global top ten outside China, and its position says a great deal about how quickly the country's museum sector has grown. It operates across several sites in the city, the best known being the History and Folk Culture Museum in Shenzhen's Civic Center.

Its core subject is unusually recent: Shenzhen was a set of market and fishing towns until it was designated China's first Special Economic Zone in 1980, after which it grew into a city of well over ten million within a single lifetime. The museum documents that transformation alongside the region's older Cantonese and Hakka heritage. Admission is free.

5. National Museum of Korea, Seoul — ~6.5 million visitors (2025)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.51 million (2025)
• Location: Yongsan, Seoul, South Korea
• Current building opened: 2005
• Admission: Free (permanent galleries)

The National Museum of Korea is the largest museum in Korea and one of the largest in Asia, occupying a long, low building in Yongsan Park designed to withstand earthquakes and to frame views of Namsan through its central passage.

Its attendance rose by more than 70 percent between 2024 and 2025, one of the sharpest jumps ever recorded in the global rankings. Much of the credit goes to the Room of Quiet Contemplation, a darkened gallery opened in 2021 holding two gilt-bronze Pensive Bodhisattva figures from the Three Kingdoms period — a display that became a genuine cultural phenomenon in Korea and a fixture on social media.

6. British Museum, London — ~6.4 million visitors (2025)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.44 million (2025)
• Location: London, United Kingdom
• Founded: 1753
• Admission: Free

The British Museum was the first public national museum in the world when it opened in 1759. Its collection of roughly 8 million objects chronicles human history from its beginnings to the present, including the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Sculptures, and the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Cairo.

The Great Court, covered by a glass roof designed by Norman Foster, opened in 2000 and is the largest enclosed public square in Europe. Free admission keeps the museum consistently among the most visited attractions on Earth — though much of its collection remains the subject of active restitution claims.

7. China Science and Technology Museum, Beijing — ~6.4 million visitors (2024)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.42 million (2024)
• Location: Olympic Green, Beijing, China
• Current building opened: 2009
• Focus: Hands-on science and technology

China's national science museum sits on the Olympic Green in northern Beijing, in a building opened in 2009 on the site developed for the 2008 Games. It is the only science museum in the global top ten.

Unlike the art and history institutions around it in this ranking, its galleries are built around interactive exhibits — mechanics, space flight, transport, the human body — and its audience is overwhelmingly families and school groups. Attendance on this scale reflects both free entry and a national policy of using science museums to support the school curriculum.

8. Natural History Museum, London — ~6.3 million visitors (2024)

• Annual Visitors: ~6.30 million (2024)
• Location: South Kensington, London, United Kingdom
• Building opened: 1881
• Specimens: ~80 million

Alfred Waterhouse's Romanesque building on Cromwell Road is one of the most recognizable museum buildings anywhere, its terracotta façade moulded with plants and animals throughout. Behind the galleries sits a research collection of roughly 80 million specimens, including material collected by Darwin.

In 2017 the centrepiece of Hintze Hall changed from "Dippy," a plaster cast of a Diplodocus skeleton, to "Hope," the real skeleton of a blue whale suspended in a diving posture — a swap that generated national debate and, in the event, more visitors. Admission is free.

9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — ~6.0 million visitors (2025)

• Annual Visitors: ~5.98 million (2025)
• Location: New York City, United States
• Founded: 1870
• Collection Size: ~1.5 million objects

The Met on Fifth Avenue is the largest art museum in the Americas and the only US museum in the global top ten. Its collection spans 5,000 years, from Egyptian temples relocated stone by stone — the Temple of Dendur among them — to European painting, American decorative arts and one of the world's great collections of arms and armour.

Admission is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents but a fixed charge for other visitors, a policy introduced in 2018 that makes the Met an outlier among the museums on this list.

10. Nanjing Museum, Nanjing — ~5.7 million visitors (2024)

• Annual Visitors: ~5.68 million (2024)
• Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
• Founded: 1933
• Admission: Free

Nanjing Museum is one of the oldest modern museums in China, founded in 1933 as the National Central Museum during the period when Nanjing was the national capital. Its main hall was designed in a revived Liao dynasty style, and a major expansion completed in 2013 added several underground galleries.

The collection runs to roughly 430,000 items, strongest in Jiangsu's own archaeology and in Ming and Qing porcelain, lacquer and textiles. One wing recreates a street of 1930s Republican-era Nanjing, which has become the museum's most popular single attraction.

Just Outside the Top Ten

• American Museum of Natural History, New York — ~5.4 million (2024)
• Tate Modern, London — ~4.6 million (2024). The world's most visited museum of modern art, housed in the former Bankside Power Station; its Turbine Hall is large enough to lay the Statue of Liberty on its side.
• Shanghai Museum East — ~4.6 million (2025), and climbing fast since opening in 2024.
• Musée d'Orsay, Paris — ~3.8 million (2025)

Key Facts

• The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world, at about 9 million visitors a year.
• China has four museums in the global top ten — more than any other country.
• Eight of the top ten are free to enter; the Louvre and the Met are the exceptions.
• The National Museum of Korea grew its attendance by more than 70 percent in a single year.
• The National Museum of China is one of the largest museum buildings in the world at 200,000 m².
• The Art Newspaper's better-known annual ranking covers art museums only, which is why science, history and natural history museums are absent from it.

Fun Facts

• It would take approximately 100 days to spend just 30 seconds looking at every object in the Louvre.
• The Mona Lisa is surprisingly small — just 77 cm by 53 cm — yet draws 80% of the Louvre's first-time visitors.
• The British Museum holds material from archaeological digs that has not been unpacked in over 100 years, simply because of the volume involved.
• The Natural History Museum's "Dippy" the Diplodocus was never a real fossil — it is a plaster cast, and the original is in Pittsburgh.
• Shenzhen Museum documents a city that did not exist in its modern form until 1980.

Final Thoughts

The composition of this list has changed more in the last decade than in the fifty years before it. A ranking once dominated by Paris, London, New York and Washington now has four Chinese entries and a Korean one, driven by state museum-building programmes, free admission, and a domestic travel market that barely registered in the global figures twenty years ago. The Louvre still leads comfortably — but the rest of the table is being rewritten.